I teach a graduate course where we study twentieth-century artworks (literature, film, visual art) focused on three classical myths: Orpheus, Icarus, and Medea. During the Medea section, we examine a painting by American Bernard Safran, known for his Time magazine portraits, simply called “Medea,” featuring a 1950s mother in pearls staring defiantly at the artist, her two male children holding on to her (or is she holding on to them?) hoping for something: protection, acknowledgement, mercy, love?—it’s difficult to tell. Fierce debate always follows: what it expresses about motherhood, American culture, the controversial classical myth. I am tempted to bring in this painting of my mother and her two children, inform my students the title is “Medea,” and record the ensuing discussion. In fact, I wonder if part of the reason I’ve been fascinated by the Medea myth is because my mother reminds me of Medea, sacrificing her two children to hurt her husband and flee the foreign culture that drained her of her magical powers.
Dizzy, sick to my stomach—I ache to break out of her painting, float away with the clouds that must exist beyond the frame. I’m angry she’s trapped and distorted us for her own comfort and entertainment. I can’t imagine what her friends must think of this travesty. And I now realize that despite having spent the last nine days in hotel surroundings, regardless of my mother’s overbearing presence, I was saved from complete immersion in her psyche and world. Now here I am. Freud and Jung would have a field day. I need to look at this space from a psychological point of view, from a writer’s distanced point of view, in order to stand it. I need to keep my horror and disgust to a minimum so I can analyze what’s going on. Otherwise, I will take a knife to this painting and choke my mother with my bare hands. So, I look at it this way. This apartment is my mother’s mind: messy, loud, passionate, illusioned, delusional, nostalgic, Catholic, sentimental, cluttered, aggressive, distressed, unapologetic, unlivable. I have a ticket for a tour of this mind, but at the end of the tour I will escape out the exit.
Removal of couch cushions; it suddenly dawns on me that this is where I will be sleeping: in the living room, on her pullout couch, underneath the giant photograph of me and the epic painting of the mother goddess and her two bucktoothed children with bad haircuts (am I sporting a South American version of a mullet?) floating in the blue sky, staring at rivers of paper and Virgin Mary ceramics and a large screen television it took my mother five years of diligent saving to afford. I have been head-whacked into the world of black family comedy. I can hear my soon-to-exist nightmares start to giggle, then laugh, then bellow.
Family at Airport upon Arrival in Brasilia
9
alien resurrection
happy easter, felice pasqua
Ellen Ripley: Any questions?
Human hosting an alien: Who are you?
Ellen Ripley: I’m the monster’s mother.
Succoro, my mother’s shrivelled housekeeper, arrives early in the morning (I guess maids don’t get holidays off in this country), while I am still lingering uncomfortably in my fold-out bed. The night was, surprisingly, chilly and, not surprisingly, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. My dreams involved volleyballs, frying pans, and book launches. I am looking forward to seeing my grandmother and aunt again though, as I believe they are genuinely happy to meet me and eager to know me better. Succoro and I have never fought. Not once. She likes me very much, my mother states proudly. I’m not sure if it’s common to fight with your staff here or not.
Succoro serves me eggs and toast and, while I am eating, I present my mother with a York University tote bag full of gifts—mostly York mugs and pins and notebooks, since I didn’t really know what to buy her but know she’s proud I’m a professor. I was waiting for Easter, I explain. She hurries away into the kitchen to open the bag in front of her cleaning lady, yelling out thank-yous for each gift as she uncovers it, while I watch CNN. In Toronto, the SARS epidemic continues, shutting down hospital wings, placing patients and staff under quarantine, and destroying tourism, and the temperature is nine degrees Celsius. Here the temperature is thirty-five. Enough to make your head melt. When my mother reappears, she is wearing the York ring and a costume bracelet of silver and gold beads from a second-hand store in Toronto. I noticed she stopped wearing the scarf I sent two days ago. Maybe this is some sort of truce. But when I politely refuse a Tic Tac, she says to Succoro, Jesus and Barabbas, as if I have chosen to crucify a saint instead of refuse a candy.
We cram into my mother’s algae-green Gol car—my first experience of my mother behind the wheel—to visit my grandmother. Although she kept boasting in São Paulo about what a wonderful driver she is, how careful and skillful, not five minutes strapped inside the car I know I’ve been had. She thinks she’s careful because she’s irritatingly fussy, but she misses very important signs. Even backing into a large parking space with her compact vehicle turns into a long-term project. While sightseeing parts of Brasilia, pointing out where she has worked, where the president and past presidents have stayed, lived, or dined, she jolts, stops, and starts. The reference point of presidents is not unusual here—identifying a place in terms of the president’s relationship to it. In Canada, people would find it laughable if we spoke of prime ministers the same way. The city, erected in forty-one months, was built on red desert clay with a population of five hundred thousand in mind. Now five times that many people live in Brasilia. And the city is built on a flat plateau. The flatness of the city is frequently cited as a cause of madness.
When I came to Brasilia in 1965, I fell in love. The urban designer, Lúcio Costa, was a genius. I love our Super Quadras—this translates into “series of boxes.” Isn’t that wonderful, a whole city built like square boxes, every neighbourhood orderly like every other? We even have a lake. A completely fake lake! They built a dam to divert waters from the river over to a construction site in the middle of the desert. What ingenuity!
As my mother lurches about the city, I have to agree. The city’s most stunning architecture, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, is ultra-modern, smooth, sleek, curved, and egg-like, framing the landscape within a science-fiction universe. When you encounter the immensity of the lake, the picturesque trees and flora on the sides of roads, it is very difficult to believe that not a single aspect of the world you have entered is natural to its environment. Everything transported and transplanted. Spliced. Cloned. Only when you double take at a glowing white cube in the middle of a field of grass does the uncanny aspect of the city jolt you: artists built this city according to their dreams. And now the dream is locked: no one is permitted to construct a building that will contrast or contradict the original abstract architectural vision, part of its status as a UNESCO World Heritage site, the first such city to be granted the honour after less than thirty years. There is something extremely comforting in this kind of consistency, order, and wholeness. Lúcio Costa even went so far as to dictate the uniform colour for bus drivers. But there is something frightening about it as well: as if the rage for order was deemed necessary to contain the irrational, brutal, unsatisfied passions of its citizenry.
I’m starting to wonder how much of my mother’s psyche is elusive to me because of culture rather than nature. If I learned one thing on a six-week cross-Canada trip I took starting in Victoria, British Columbia, and finishing on Prince Edward Island, it’s that landscape and environment are responsible for everything: weather, diet, clothing, industry, economy, and especially personality. If you live among the Rocky Mountains, you can’t help but climb them, spend your days looking up, seeking adventure. If you live where you can see for miles without a single obstruction, not a hill or tower or farm, you become a master of patience, of seasonal planning. If you live on an island where the soil is so red it literally stains your skin, no matter where you travel that sand never rubs off and you always feel homesick. São Paolo’s commercial hustle and bustle and arts institutions suit my mother’s hunger for constant entertainment, endless sensory input to fuel her fantasy life. Brasilia seems to feed her
need for order and predictability. But she grew up in Rio de Janeiro, I can’t forget this, a city with a reputation for complete disorder and dysfunction and a mess of contradictions; a city of brutal violence on the one hand and the largest dance party in the world on the other, with one of the tallest art deco sculptures of Christ on top of a massive hill, watching over its mansions and apartment complexes and millions living a precarious existence in the favelas day and night. The old capital city. My mother’s family one of the first to move from one capital to another. One of the first to exchange one set of dreams for another. And proud to do so. When my mother first set foot in this futuristic city raised from dust in the desert, she would have been just a wide-eyed little girl, her own dreams like the new species of plants, just beginning to take root under the sun.
Two main highways vein into the city and out east, west, north, and south to the Super Quadras; each Super Quadra meant to be self-contained, with its own set of stores, restaurants, nightclub, church, park, and school. Lúcio Costa wanted to create a city of “happy families”—no wasting too much time in transit because everything essential would be close by. My mother’s apartment building was the first residential structure erected. While I love the modernist architecture of Niemeyer—elusive, stark, clinical, yet still dreamy; many buildings look like spaceships out of 2001 or the Alien series—the Super Quadras, with their grey boxes on top of grey boxes, like giant hives, leave me empty, fascist in construction to my eyes, even after only one day. Lúcio Costa also seems to have designed one adult erotic video store in each neighbourhood—I suppose to deal with any unhappy families.
We will be attending church in my grandmother’s Super Quadra, not just because she is the matriarch and as such the unrivalled queen of the Campos family, but because her church is considered the most beautiful in Brasilia outside of the Niemeyer cathedral. The Church of Dom Bosco is named after the Italian saint John Bosco, who in 1883 dreamed the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the new city of God. He documented the dream in his journal. Brasilia was built on those coordinates seventy years later, in the middle of a desert no less. Constructed out of hundreds of panels of bright blue stained glass, rows of which open and tilt diagonally when it is too hot and shut when it rains, light floods into the church, baking us all in a heavenly blue glow. It’s gorgeous, Grandmother, I say as she escorts me around the inside perimeter on this very bright, blistering day.
It’s funny, at once I call her “grandmother”; I have yet to call my mother “mother” even once in front of her while I’ve been here. I have simply avoided this admittance, though she calls me daughter constantly and refers to herself as my mother to whomever we encounter. Likely it’s another thing my mother finds hurtful about my behaviour, although I’m not doing it to hurt her—I don’t have the Canadian passive-aggressive gene, I’m not adverse to confrontation when necessary. I just don’t feel like her daughter. Regardless of similarities in physical characteristics or predisposed likes and dislikes, our healthy appetites and vivid imaginations, our connection doesn’t feel natural. I’m a different species. One perhaps invented in a lab, a clone of a daughter that didn’t quite progress according to plan, developing mutations or defects like the clones made of Ellen Ripley in Alien Resurrection. You’re not human, the characters keep reminding her. She knows it’s true, but lives like a human nonetheless. Not that I feel like a granddaughter. I don’t, but I don’t really know what a granddaughter is since my father’s mother died giving birth to him and his own father died before I was born. And though I’ve spent a lot of time with other people’s mothers, I haven’t spent much time with other people’s grandmothers. Therefore, a grandmother is more of an imaginative construct to me and I’m willing to explore its dimensions with this thin, smiling woman with the deep wrinkles and sparkling blue eyes that match the church’s stained glass windows. Besides, I’m desperate to be protected among the other members of the family. If it wasn’t for meeting them now, I don’t think I could survive this trip—I would likely cause irreparable damage if left exclusively to my mother’s care for much longer. As I said, I’m not adverse to confrontation when necessary, and without more buffers or interference I fear I will become aggressive and bar teeth in my defence to achieve distance. My mother has even taken to shadowing me to the washroom now, standing outside stall doors while I pee, lecturing me on a variety of subjects from her opinions on Jesus to vegetarianism to cancer treatments to Brazilian beaches. I am grateful for the novelty of new faces and the mandatory silence of a church. Plus, my mother has mentioned that my grandmother despises the portrait painting hanging over her couch, so it’s clear my grandmother possesses superior taste and judgment. I might be an alien creature, but I can sniff out who wants blood.
During mass, I sit on a short wooden pew in between my mother and my grandmother, both dressed in baby blue to match the church. My Aunt Victoria and her daughter Elizabeth, who I encounter for the second time as an extremely beautiful, painfully shy young woman, are seated behind us, both in white tops and blue denim pants. All the women here wear airy blouses, the men dress shorts and short-sleeved dress shirts—it’s so hot! I wear a simple fire-truck-red one-piece cotton business dress. Nobody cares about exposed shoulders, even on a special mass day. Heat commands all.
Split Screen
I still can’t quite believe that it’s Easter and I’m attending mass with my mother’s side of the family. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to mass, let alone a holiday mass. After grade eight graduation, I left my Catholic high school for a public one and don’t think I’ve ever attended a mass since. My father never pushed the issue but has since expressed his sadness, on several occasions, that I no longer believe in God. Whereas I express astonishment that someone in his condition still does. Not that we ever made too much of a fuss on holidays. While I’ve always adored celebrations—any excuses for happiness—as we grew into teenagers my brother and I spent more holidays outside the home at the houses of friends, where we’d be separately treated to sliced ham and roast beef and mashed potatoes and stuffed turkeys and shortbread cookies and pumpkin pies, not our usually holiday fare of take-out pizza. No additional meals: lunches, brunches, day-after breakfasts, or visits to the houses of other family members; these were reserved for real families with real holiday itineraries. No gifts to unwrap. For us, a card from my father, picked out by a homecare worker, in a simple white envelope containing a modest cheque, which we were told we could spend however we liked but were strongly encouraged to save for our education. Then we’d watch an action flick or comedy in the living room until my father would be transferred back to his bed by a homecare worker eager to end the day. And when I first left home, I remember several years of spending Christmas Eve alone, tipsy on red wine, watching the midnight airing of Alastair Sim’s A Christmas Carol—a movie I still insist on watching each and every Christmas Eve, no matter where I happen to be. Even the old lady I moved in with after the woman who wanted to adopt me reneged on her offer—a gentle but lonely white woman in her eighties who would count the days per week I’d spend out late because she needed a boarder to help pass the hours, not because she needed the money—would find herself picked up by one of her four sons on Christmas Eve (I wish I had girls, she confessed. Boys will pay your bills for you when you’re old, but they don’t visit like girls do.) I offered to work Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, New Year’s Day, and other holidays at the drugstore to earn time-and-a-half. The only day I didn’t like to work was Canada Day—a national party with strangers out on Parliament Hill, dancing to rock concerts and cheering on acrobats tossing and eating fire, open bottles of beer and wine and glow-in-the-dark necklaces and headgear, red maple leafs everywhere; I guess I felt more Canadian than part of a family. Now my usual Easter routine is to either skip the holiday entirely—aside from a handful of chocolate eggs—because it generally falls smack in the middle of end-of-term marking and a trip out to visit Chris’s family tak
es up too much time, or we end up across town eating delectable brisket and scalloped potatoes courtesy of one of my surrogate Jewish mothers.
The priest instructs us to join hands with our neighbours and between pews. The significance of the seating arrangement now hits me as I am forced to hold my mother’s and my grandmother’s hands, a genetic chain. I must have held my mother’s hand as a child, I must have, I tell myself, though this is the first time in at least twenty years. Besides flesh cushioning bone, I feel nothing to my left. No warmth or goosebumps, no sudden flood of memory. I might as well be holding the hand of a stranger on a bus. But my right hand feels at ease, secure, connected. I know already that I am fond of my grandmother, even if I haven’t yet figured out how to understand her role as accessory in my mother’s disappearance. She is elegant and exudes grace and power. My mother resents this, has told me her father treated my grandmother like a queen, “carrying her everywhere,” and that her brother and sister also treat her like a queen and do everything she desires. I gather my mother is baffled by the fact that my grandmother commands much more attention by silence than she does by speech. Her body, though thin, bony, and arthritic, is the stronger of the two, and I am drawn to it like a magnet.
After the service, without hesitation my grandmother takes my arm and directs me to the large wooden cross at the front of the church and the marble statue of the crowned Virgin with baby Jesus to the right of the altar. She, too, is enamoured of art and draws my eye to the fine craftsmanship. My mother is now second fiddle, and I do feel bad for her—I go back and forth on this tidal shore of emotions—it’s not easy to know you are not as liked as you hoped, and my mother must feel this intensely within her immediate family circle. Definitely the black sheep, the stain, the unfortunate experiment that went terribly wrong.
Projection Page 18
